Dulles may finally see some real traffic growth from United Airlines. The carrier announced schedule changes today for the Fall 2018 season that will see the Newark hub transition to focus more on local (O/D) traffic while Dulles will see growth for a few routes that carry more connecting travelers. The new schedules take effect on 4 October 2018.
The schedule adjustments are designed to offer more nonstop flights to destinations popular with New York area customers while reallocating largely connecting passenger flights on short-haul routes to United’s hub at Washington-Dulles. United will transition service between New York/Newark and Chattanooga, Tennessee; Ithaca, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania to Washington-Dulles.
We approached these schedule adjustments with our customers in mind, knowing that we wanted to create a schedule that offers customers beginning their travel in the New York City area convenient flights to many of the business and leisure destinations they frequent the most. Since more of our customers begin their travel from New York/Newark than any other United hub city, we’ve created a more customer friendly schedule that removed connection times and provided convenient nonstop service to multiple U.S. destinations. – Ankit Gupta, United’s Vice President of Domestic Network
In Newark some 15 destinations are seeing an increase in service frequencies and, in some cases, upgauge in aircraft size.
The airport will also see six smaller markets dropped. In addition to the three mentioned as transitioning to Dulles United will halt service from Newark to Des Moines, Baltimore and Hartford. While the shift toward the O/D market traffic is part of the story, so is the adjustments in the operating circumstances at Newark Airport in the past couple years.
Playing the slots??
In April 2016 the FAA removed slot controls at Newark. This reduced the value of United’s portfolio of slots. It also meant that the carrier no longer needed to publish routes that would more frequently be delayed or canceled when ATC or weather limitations required the airline to reduce operations at the airport. Put another way, these six destinations were, in many ways, never really expected to fully contribute to the hub passenger flows at Newark so much as to be easily sacrificed when needed. And those shorter hops were easier to cancel and accommodate passengers.
Of course, with the increase in flights to other markets United is still using a similar number of slots but now is expecting more NYC-related traffic on those planes. It will be somewhat harder to handle reroutes or cancellations should those come to pass. With additional frequencies in those markets, however, the later flight rebooking option may prove sufficient.
Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
It is also worth noting that the connectivity growth at Dulles comes, at least initially on the CRJ-200. These are not the ideal aircraft for passenger comfort and betting on them to build out the network is a rough position to be in.
Separately, the carrier also announced seasonal service to Palm Springs from Newark, competing with the JetBlue JFK route that showed strong performance the past few years. United will also make its seasonal Key West service year-round from Newark.
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Can’t tell you how happy I am to be out of the biz travel game. Being tied to United, I feel like I got out just as the airline started to go the wrong direction for pax.
The CRJ thing is awful in many ways, but at least the company admits it is not a good choice. And for the few passengers on those routes the higher chance of making the connection on the same aircraft they were on anyways is an upgrade in some ways. Just not enough of one for me to be pleased with the way UA is growing the CRJ fleet right now. They want to recapture market share but are also trying to do so against operations from DL/AA that generally offer a better product. That’s a really strange play.
Just started? Feels like some of those negative changes started years ago, with some slight improvement, that they’ve now backtracked on. 2013-2014 were pretty awful years for them, when it comes to on board experience (the years of the never ending burrito lunch/dinner that made Taco Bell look good) and on-time operations.
As a customer, I still get the impression United doesn’t really have a clear vision as to who they are or what kind of product they want to offer. Parts of the airline feel like they’re trying to be player on the higher end of the market (Polaris Lounges), other parts feel like a ULCC. They also can’t seem to offer anything consistently or keep new product offerings around long enough to really mature them and make them feel polished.
The bulk of my travel was post-Smisek, pre-Kirby. The airline was in good shape.
Hiring Kirby is quite possibly one of the most questionable decisions they’ve ever made. I can’t help but look at the fact that AA allowed him to walk out their door and into UA’s practically the next morning (seriously, what company has ever allowed a competitor to do that with such a high ranking executive) was AA’s way of saying “Haha, good luck, Suckers.”
Bingo!
I walked to DL in 2011-2012 just as the merger hit, and I don’t regret it. Of course, where I live.
Not sure about that chart. FLL is already way more than 6x daily, and with many of those 739.
Yeah. Right now it’s 8. And if you look at schedule on October 4th it has 7 not 6.
But of those seven flights three are on A320 family. Switching to 6x 738 minimum increases capacity. RSW is similar.
But it’s not switching to 6. It will be seven on the 4th of October. Yes. All on the 737-800
Aside from the CRJ-200 thing, what is connecting in EWR like vs. IAD?
Express to Mainline at IAD (and vv) is arguably worse than EWR, which is no picnic itself. You either deal with the people movers or the train. Concessions are limited and lounges are junk (with none existing in close proximity to the majority of the express operations). IAD boards up to 4 flights concurrently from Express gates, which makes a nightmare terminal and raises it to train-wreck status.
The one saving grace of IAD concourse A is that you can use the LH and TK lounges as a UA *G even when flying domestically.
So, not much has changed since I used to fly UA regularly in the early 2000s and connect in IAD every weekend. Is EWR a fairly easy connection to make?
There’s a good amount of UAX out of C/D, though, which makes for easy connections to UA mainline. EWR Terminal C is a nicer facility than IAD C/D but I’ll take better schedule reliability any day of the week
Yes, there is some Express operations out of C/D but you never know what you’re going to get. You can’t reliably book an express to mainline connection at IAD and assume you’ll stay at midfield.
Brian Fisher, no, not much has changed since early 2000s. iAir has come and gone but that’s about the only difference.
Approximately 25% of UA flights at Newark arrive late vs 12% at Dulles.
The late arrival stat at EWR is that low? I’m actually surprised it’s not higher, but it may just be too many bad experiences with short-hops in the afternoon on Express flights driving up my delays there.
Any thoughts about the Oct time line of the combining of flight attendant groups and this new flying?
I’m not sure it factors too much. Ultimately it means the overall operation gets cheaper and more reliable (or at least more flexible) for the company but I don’t think it plays into shifts like this one too much.
United should have long ago “banned” most connections via EWR except to select international destinations. EWR’s poor OTP practically guarantees the airline sets money on fire handling misconnections on city pairs with fare levels not worth the hassle.
Yep, and they probably could still stand to upgauge a bit more on some routes, and also trim frequency a little here and there, with an eye on a schedule that has a realistic chance of operating on time on an average day, as opposed to schedules that look great on a timetable but have no chance in hell of running on time past 11:30 AM on 75% of weekdays.
I’ll never forget back in the day when the early afternoon flight from CLE – EWR was scheduled to be over two hours long to help prevent misconnects to Europe. And it still wasn’t enough!
I had to wave my in-laws off from a 43 minute EWR connection to Europe from ITH. That UA will sell such is really unfortunate.
43 minutes at EWR is looney, but it’s only slightly better at IAD with an A to C or low C to high D connection.
Yeah, the EWR minimum connection times have always seemed way too optimistic – even for domestic-domestic connections. I’ve had experiences where everything was right on time, but an A arrival on an ERJ to a mainline departure out of C that was 50 minutes was put at risk but the time it took to unload the gate checked bags, take the bus transfer to C, and then get to the gate there. Back in my CO/UA days, it wasn’t unusual to kill 15 minutes in the jet bridge waiting for the first gate check to be brought up, and it got to the point that if my flight into EWR was on an RJ or prop, I would just check my bags through. The time spent waiting at baggage claim at my destination was still less than the hassle of a missed connection, which happened more than once at EWR.
I’m on those affected flights literally every week and constantly see people set up for misconnections. UA should make the MCT for EWR at least 90 minutes in the afternoon…that combined with the padding that’s already built into the block time would really reduce the number of problems.